


Sweet dreams and sleep tight

by FastPacedFreeFall



Category: Hey Arnold!
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Jungle Movie spoilers, Post-The Jungle Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-02-06 14:37:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12819684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FastPacedFreeFall/pseuds/FastPacedFreeFall
Summary: A quiet summer night finds Miles and Stella staring down the barrel of those nine lost years.





	Sweet dreams and sleep tight

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, this popped into my head about an hour after the movie, and it made me start crying in the shower, so I thought I would share.
> 
> First draft, not all that edited.

* * *

Miles is breathing in a sigh before the door can even finish closing, despite Stella doing her best to stay quiet. It's not like he was sleeping anyway.

This can't keep happening.

It's not that he doesn't understand why Stella keeps going back; he has the same dreams, swimming in darkness and chasing after garbled voices, cut off from their friends, from the people they've tried so hard to revive. 

Cut off from Arnold.

They're both left drained the next day, and they can't keep forcing themselves to keep going with coffee and energy drinks, not if they actually want to be around for the rest of their son's childhood. Miles tries to fight through it and out-stubborn his nightmares, but Stella has taken to wandering the boarding house like a ghost, always ending up at the same spot. The stairs are already down and waiting for him when he turns the corner of the hallway, the carpet feeling strange under his bare feet.

Going into the attic doesn't feel any less strange after two weeks of being back home; he looks at the shelves filled with the accumulation of Arnold's life and still sees bare wood, a simple crib where his son's bed now lays. A room that used to wait to be filled with their lives, the trappings that come with a family. It's fuller now, but all those cluttered shelves do is serve to remind him how much they've missed, memories that the three of them will never fully share. Moments they were all robbed of, some that can't be made up or replaced. He knows he should stay positive, focus on the sheer dumb luck that the three of them are together again. It's hard not to feel that loss, though.

Stella doesn't turn as he comes in, her tired eyes fixed on a patch of messy blonde hair poking out of a blanketed lump. He sets a hand on her shoulder, sitting next to her on the floor.

Her muscles are already tense; he doesn't need to say anything.

“It's so strange,” she whispers, reaching up to thread her fingers through that hair. “All that time before the sickness got to us, and we never thought of how things would be different.” Her shoulder tenses a touch more, the way it always has when she's holding back tears. Even after nine years, he knows all her little tics. “We didn't think about our baby being gone.”

His hand slides down, wrapping around her waist in a half-hug. “He's right here, honey,” Miles murmurs back. “He's not going anywhere, and neither are we.”

“I know. I know, Miles, but... he's ten now. Almost eleven. He's had his first words, his first day at school. The first time he rode a bike, his first fight with his friends.” She pauses, throat catching on the next words. “His first kiss. And we missed all of it. He's so grown-up, and next year he's going to junior high. Our baby's not our baby anymore, Miles.”

She falls silent, and he feels that silence wrap around them, suffocating with the lack of comfort he can give her, or himself. There's no getting around it; their son has grown into a first draft of the man he'll become without them around to see it themselves, and the ache of that loss burns through his chest. Even now, he keeps glancing up to where Arnold is twisted in his sheets, half-convinced he'll disappear the second he looks away. It's a paranoia neither of them knows what to do with, except keep their own little vigil until time finally convinces them that all of this won't disappear into the foggy depths of another decade of darkness. They can't keep tabs on Arnold, or each other, every second of the day, though; that will only destroy the fragile new bond between them.

So Miles slips his other arm around his wife, scooting her back to lean against his chest, and gently rocks back and forth the way they used to when Arnold was small, knowing that words won't bring any solace to his wife, but this small, familiar motion might.

He knows it's worked when her hushed voice cuts through that veil of silence with the song she would sing to herself in the Green-Eyed People's city, hunched over her research and missing home.

_Lullaby, and goodnight._  
_Sweet dreams and sleep tight._

He picks up the next lines, and for a moment, he can see what remains of his baby boy in the young man sleeping soundly beside them.

_Know we love you more each day,_  
_While you sleep and while you play._

_You're so sweet, through and through._

_We're now complete, thanks to you._

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed!


End file.
